Maximising our skills, together

By Elisavet Tapini · July 04, 2016

04

July 2016

After some years in acting, I retrained as a psychologist and I've been practicing and lecturing for most of the past decade. The desire to help and empower people is intrinsic in this work; nevertheless, the focus on 1-1 relations had started taking its toll on me. I always had an ideological difficulty with this. Hence I shifted to social science research, looking at long-term, successful migrations to London and intercultural communication. I have been quite involved in the skills’ exchange movement, from travel communities and festivals to city-based skills’ exchange collectives. I consider this extremely important. The world moves towards automation, scarcity of resources will affect our lives more and more, wherever we are. As skills become obsolete, new ones need to develop. This cannot happen if we don’t create a shared knowledge base, which can operate both within and outside the monetary system. People will need jobs and skills to create new social practices, if we are to manage the difficulties we face ahead. From learning to listen to each other to developing sustainable practices and localised networks, we need eachother. Let’s do it.